Ukraine’s Kyivstar Taps Amdocs to Bring Startup Innovation to its Customers

Kyivstar, the largest mobile service provider in Ukraine, together with Amdocs, a provider of software and services to communications and media companies, have announced a strategic collaboration targeted to broaden Kyivstar's innovative approach and widen the telecom operator's portfolio of best-in-class products and services for its 26,4 million subscribers.

The announcement was made in conjunction with the annual Amdocs Innovation Week.

"Innovations are among the top priorities for Kyivstar as they are a part of our transformation strategy of combining both telco and tech," said Peter Chernyshov, CEO of Kyivstar. "We are excited to explore new technological frontiers with Amdocs and we are sure that both parties will benefit from our partnership. Areas we plan to focus on include customer interaction, IoT and enterprise applications."

Kyivstar aims to alter the perception of mobile operators as providers of mobile services and data traffic. The goal is to speed up Kyivstar's transformation into a technological company that provides a full range of products and services to customers.

Kyivstar is looking for new ideas inside the company by holding hackathons for employees, helping Ukrainian startups develop their ideas into products by arranging Telecom accelerators, and now – with Amdocs – by searching and scouting for innovative solutions on global scale.

"We have decided to expand our cooperation with Amdocs, due to its high quality expertise in telecom, including such key areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence, cloud, microservices and DevOps," explained Chernyshov.

Under the agreement, Amdocs will provide Kyivstar with the necessary support to introduce innovative solutions to its subscribers and enterprise customers through fast innovation sprints that cover the full cycle, from ideation, validation and experimentation, all the way to commercialization. Building on Amdocs' design-thinking approach to product development and consulting practices, which stipulates that solution development should begin with the end user's needs in mind, Amdocs will work with Kyivstar to broaden its practices in design-thinking and to identify customer-centric solutions that can deliver new value to its markets.

"Ukraine is a renowned programming powerhouse and we are excited to be working hand in hand with Kyivstar to bring new value to end users in this dynamic market," said Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of Amdocs Technology. "It's a strong triangle: Kyivstar bringing the end-user perspective and its view of innovation taking place in its market, Amdocs sharing the perspective of thousands of service ideas from our global customer footprint, and our wide ecosystem of partners, ranging from promising startups, well-established organizations and leading academic institutions, bringing their innovations. Combined, we can turn good ideas into scalable, commercial propositions, quickly. More and more carriers around the world are working with us to create such innovation triangles. We call this innovation in practice."

Amdocs supports Kyivstar's customer engagement platform, prepaid billing operations and inventory management with different digital, business and operational support systems previously deployed.

Amdocs Innovation Week is an annual global event targeted to nurture new ways of thinking and celebrate innovation throughout Amdocs. This year's focus is consumerism and design-led, customer-centric innovation. A 24-hour hackathon ended today in which more than 1,200 Amdocs employees across 15 countries and 5 continents were challenged to create consumer apps reaching one million users.